Open Coffee Club @Bangalore

BangaloreOcc is the official blog of Open Coffee Club @ Bangalore. OCC bangalore is an open forum for Entrepreneurs, VC's and budding Entrepreneurs to come together and connect with each other at the grass root level. The group holds its meetings every alternate Sunday.

Sharad has un-parallel experience of successfully wearing numerous hats (and for the same reason in the above registration link, you also get to suggest on what you would like to talk to him):Entrepreneur: Co-founder and CEO of Teltier Technologies, a wireless infrastructure start-up that is now part of Cisco.Intrapreneur: Setting up AT&T/Lucent’s R&D in India.CEO & SVP: Yahoo! India R&D.Board Director: Consim / Bharat Matrimony and Yahoo!7.EIR: Canaan Partners.Turnaround: He was responsible for turning around the Symantec (formerly VERITAS Software), operations in India.Not for Profit: Executive Council Member of NASSCOM. Chair for the NASSCOM Product Forum.Industries: Wireless, Software & Internet.Passionate about: Cloud computing infrastructure & applications and Product development
You may learn more about Sharad at: http://in.linkedin.com/in/sharadsharma and follow him on Twittter @Sharads

A little about the Venue: Jaaga is an urban community art-architecture experiment. It is community space created to serve the arts, technology and social change communities in Bangalore.

In case of any further queries / help, do give a shout or email Ramjee (93425 09088) or myself (93431 71420). And yep Ramjee is more equipped to assist regarding the venue.

Monday, March 30, 2009

Hoping all of you had a nice time during Ugadi, and enjoyed the long weekend.

As most of you know, we just finished the meet yesterday on “VC/Entrepreneur: Two sides of a coin”. The number of new faces in this meet was overwhelming, and undoubtedly encouraging. It’s always nice to meet enthusiasts from different walks of life working on his/her big idea. The phenomenal turn-out in the theme/interactive meet prompted us to put together another meet to network, and to get to know each other better. The last three OCC meets have been theme meets – “Play safe with Real Estate Laws”, “Discoverability, Distribution and Monetization of Online Videos” and “VC/Entrepreneur:Two sides of a coin”; and the time is right for a generic meet. So, here I’m, announcing the next OCC Bangalore meet on 5th April.

Yup, we are meeting next week. The reasons –

-As I mentioned, we saw many new faces today. Here’s a chance for those introductions and to know the OCC fraternity well

-We’ve not talked about ourselves for a whileJ

-It’s New Year for many the following week - rescheduling for some breathing space in between

-We have a great new venue which we would like to explore!

Date: 5th Apr 09

Time: 10:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Type of Meet: Generic Meet / Open discussion

Agenda:

-We talk about ourselves and our progress on our ideas/ventures

-Introduction of new faces and sharing of their ideas/ventures

-Exploring help/collaboration on any challenges that you have been facing

Cover Charge: INR 50 (to be adjusted against beverages and/or snacks that you may like to order).

The Ants Café has worked out delicious combo menu just for OCC guests at Rs.75. So, you can grab your breakfast as well during the meet – this place is famous for its breakfast.

Directions: Get on to 14thMain from 100ft Road, Indiranagar. 14th Main in the lane between NewHorizonSchool and the Limelite Salon. The Café is on the first right as soon as you enter the 14thMain from 100ft Road. The Café is on top of the Ants – the store.

It’s a good idea to park your car on the 100 ft road – there is parking space near new HorizonSchool.

Monday, March 23, 2009

The next OCC meet on 29th Mar is an attempt at the view from both sides of the coin- VC as well as an entrepreneur.

Here are the details about the meet:

Meet Type: Theme Meet / Interactive Guest Meet

Agenda: Two sides of a coin: VC/Entrepreneur. Our guest speaker will demystify VCs from his experience as a VC as well entrepreneur.

Guest Speaker: K.Ganapathy Subramanian.

Ganapathy has been part of the innovation industry as a classical VC since 1992. He was the Group Manager of Private Equity Investments (Information Technology) at ICICI Venture, India's leading venture capital firm. He was the founding partner of Jumpstartup: an India-US early stage venture fund formed in 2000.His area of focus has been investments in young and high growth companies in the software and services industries. At Jumpstartup, Ganapathy has led investments (and exits) and held active board member in several technology companies. In 2006, he founded MyDunia Networks - a web based service platform for mobile consumer and consumer interactive businesses for Beyond Voice services. Currently, he is back to the VC industry as CEO of India Innovation Fund. He has been a speaker in various events, including the WAT Blog session in Proto.in. So those who missed him in January, here’s a chance to catch up with him.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Jan 09 is definitely by all means a promised month for the startup community & ecosystem - going ahead with the spirit of developing a sustainable startup ecosystem, here are the details of the upcoming OCC meet. If you are new to Open Coffee Club, Bangalore, you can read out a Detailed FAQ about Open Coffee Club Bangalore.

Guest: Mr. Neetibodh Agarwal. He has spent most of his professional years (including Novell & CA) in building software products. Currently he contributes to CoreObjects, wearing multiple hats in Delivery, Business Development & Strategy.

1. Challenges to Entrepreneurs in their pursuit of Building Technology Products.

2. Similarities and differences in Building Consumer & Enterprise Products.

Note: Thankfully the above will be discussed using real life cases as the foundation (without getting into specific company names & details).Key Points:

1. The above topics are more from an entrepreneurs and founding teams perspective and less from a pure technologist perspective.

2. If you are essentially a non techie but leading or a part of technology driven startup then don't miss the meet. Neeti will share insights on what should be your approach in product development; managing internal / partner / external teams. Also, how to avoid most common mistakes.

3. The above topics are so vast and there is so much to learn from Neeti so suggest the following:

a. Please be on time so that we start at sharp 10:30 AM.

b. It is a theme meet, wide topic, so if you are late, I am afraid - we can't be repeating the already discussed content.

c. Yes the idea is to have a very interactive session but please be brief, to the point and don't hijack the thread or go off-tangent. Take such discussions off-line. Neeti will be available post the talk as well.

d. To save on time, club / bundle similar or closely tied questions so that they get addressed in one go.

NOTE: Folks who are currently not a part of the mailing list - requesting you to come for couple of meets so that you really get hang of what actually happens at OCC and then you are most welcome to be added to the group.

Thankfully Jan 09 is already a promised month for our Startup Ecosystem & Community and even more especially for Bangalore.

Taking into account HeadStart on 9th & 10th Jan and Proto.in on 23rd & 24th Jan we will be having the OCC meets on 4th & 18th Jan 09 instead of what otherwise would have been on 11th & 25th Jan 09.

4th Jan, Generic Meet, ZOE restolounge (Indira Nagar).

18th Jan, Theme Meet, Guest: Neetibodh Agarwal. He has spend most of his professional years (including Novell & CA) in building software products. Currently he works with CoreObjects, wearing multiple hats in Delivery, Business Development & Strategy. We are yet to freeze on the topic but it can range from:

a. Building Consumer Products Vs Enterprise Products

b. Building Products in the Security Domain.

c. Learnings from Open Source Development Teams ...

Well for above - the focus will be from an Entrepreneur's perspective and not a pure technologist perspective. You may observe:

Most of us don't come back from an OCC meet and write too much about it. I guess this goes more for Generic Meets and lesser for Theme & Special Meets.

In 2008 we had many generic meets and some of them were really moving in terms of dialogue, content & debate (as well as humour at times). Such was the case for the last meet of 2008 - the one at the new venue ZOE. We had 12 folks as new comers and for few others it was their second meet.

At times I get amazed to see frequently new faces, time and again people come after few months and talk about their absence and most importantly nothing sounds better than people sharing - I heard about OCC just 30 - 60 minutes ago and here I am.

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

We at Open Coffee Club Bangalore are proud to announce our close association with TiE for TiE Entrepreneurial Summit (TES 08) to be held at Hotel Grand Ashok, Bangalore on 16, 17 & 18 Dec 08.

We request you to spare some time on http://www.tiesummit.org/ and make yourself familiar with the upcoming event. The short of it is - TES is Asia's largest Summit that will be bringing together a galaxy of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, policy makers, academia, industry, thought leaders and other major stake holders. TES 2008 will focus on retail, real estate, hospitality, healthcare, education, aerospace, manufacturing, fashion, social entrepreneurship, cleantech, mobile and financial services.

The registration for the event is now open and there are early bird offers as well. "OCC B’lore Members" get to avail same rates as TiE members which are lower than that for non-members.

Till the run-down to the above event, OCC Members will get more updates / mailers on the OCC mailing list and do feel free to contact OCC facilitators in case you need more information.

OCC Members are welcome to connect with Shashi Kiran, key official at TiE Bangalore. You can write to Shashi on shashikiran@tiebangalore.org or buzz him at 98450 18124.

Some of you may recall that Shashi was present in the 3rd Aug 08 OCC Hooeey Meet and shared with you more about TiE activities. Starting with this event, we hope going forward OCC B’lore will have more synergies with TiE.

Hope TES 08 and TiE-OCC partnership really helps some of you. Do make some use of it.

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Well we are already looking forward to an interesting OCC meet on 3rd Aug 08 and it just seems to get bigger.

Vijay Anand of Proto.in, Sameer Gulgani of Morpheus Venture Partners, Anjana Vivek of VentureBean, Anjana Kaul of Footprint ventures, Ganesh Rengaswamy (Ex-Greylock) are all likely to be there (and maybe one more surprise guest).

Note: Sameer Gulgani and Anjana Vivek have also been our previous guests at OCC.

Post our interactive session with Rajeev (as outlined in the mail attached below), the above mentioned folks will be all ears to whatever you have to share, ask, inquire. They will help you with your mixed bag of queries across topics, do some creative problem solving and nurture cross-pollination of ideas.

On an another note: We are also likely to have Amit Pande – one of the key organizer for Dcamp 2.0 and hopefully Shashi Kiran from TiE Bangalore.

Request you to make most of the opportunity and contribute as well. Given that we have more on our plate we will increase the duration of the gathering: 10:30 AM – 01:00 PM.

For the first time in OCC Bangalore we have an interesting situation – where our featured guest is also keen to be our host. Cheers!

Ladies & Gentlemen – this coming Sunday we will be meeting with Rajeev K Purnaiya. Rajeev had most of his higher education in US (a B.S. in Industrial & Systems Engineering from the University of Alabama and an M.S. in Industrial Engineering from Texas A&M University).

Rajeev was the Founder and Managing Director of CyberBazaar, India's first and largest conferencing company. After selling CyberBazaar to WebEx, Inc., he was the Managing Director of WebEx India until mid-2005.

Subsequently, Rajeev has gone back to entrepreneurship and has recently launched – “hooeey” – which helps you manage your browsing productivity. You may learn more at: http://www.hooeey.com/

We will interact with Rajeev on the following points:

-Rajeev’s initial days and the first ideas / plans / thoughts on wanting to be an entrepreneur

-Experience of launching & building CyberBazaar. It’s acquisition by WebEx

-Ideas behind “hooeey” and the product launch. More discussion on the product as well.

-Transition from a Telecom Venture to a Web Based Product.

-Experiences, lessons and other points which the group may want to learn from Rajeev

Folks you are welcome to register and actually usehttp://www.hooeey.com/ for a while before the meet. This will enable you to give feedback to Rajeev and his team. Though we are not keen to do a hooeey’s demo but couple of members from product team will be available to help you - in case you want to look at the product and talk more tech, usability and other points. As the meet is in their office – we will have access to some desktops, internet.

Here are the Logistics:

Date: 3rd Aug 08

Day: Sunday

Time: 10:30 AM – 12:30 PM

Venue: Principal Axis, 34/1 Crescent Road, Bangalore, 560 001.

Office Board Line: 4126 6279/80/81 (request you to call the front desk in this week and make sure you get the directions correct so as to avoid delays on Sunday)